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204

ARCHITECTURE AND ANTIQUITIES

[ch.

the country but more especially the Talaings, come in the month of February, and cast jewellery and precious stones into the yawning rift, and, clambering up the rock by the aid of a bamboo ladder, cover the payah with flowers and small lighted candles, making it look like a new nebulous constellation from the far off plains. Inquirers are told with the utmost confidence that the pagoda is five thousand years old. It certainly has been there time out of mind, and the boulder has solely been kept in its place by the hair buried under the shrine, and given to a hermit by the great Budh himself when he returned from Tawa-dehutha, the second heaven of the Nat-dewahs, on the occasion of his preaching the law to his mother....The view from the pagoda is superb; bounded on the east by the blue Martaban hills, fading away into the dim peaks of Siam; and extending southward over tangled jungle and yellow paddy lands to the bright waves of the Gulf of Martaban, while to the west the jewelled speck of the pagoda at Pegu almost leads one to imagine the stately bulk of the Shway Dagohn beyond[1].

Bilugyun in Amherst has sixty pagodas of venerable age. At Amherst Point is Yele, within a hundred feet of which no woman may tread. Sandaw, in the same district, claims to be as old as Shwe Dagôn. At a very famous pagoda, Shinmôkti, in Tavoy, is an image which floated miraculously across the Bay of Bengal. Other shrines of great antiquity in Tavoy and Mergui are merely names.

In Arakan, the most interesting archaeological remains are at Mrohaung, the capital from 1430 to 1782.

The largest and best monuments and sculptures of Mrohaung belong to the 15th and 16th centuries. Their interest lies in the fact that some of them are unlike in style to anything seen in the rest of Burma; they were temples as well as forts at the same time. Another interesting feature, very rare in Burma, and even in Pagan itself, is that stone was very largely used for building....Solid or cylindrical pagodas...are completely built of stone and are generally among the best preserved monuments at Mrohaung[2].

  1. ↑ The Burman, 167—168.
  2. ↑ Archaeological Survey Report, Burma, 1920—21.
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